


This is How We B-B-Breakdown

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Attempted Rape, Blood, Complete, Fucked Up Narritive Structure, Gen, M/M, Mental Instability, Mentions of Suicide, Non-Graphic Attempt at Sexual Assault, Self Harm, Slice-Of-Life in a Superhero AU, Some IRL parellels, Unbeta'd, attempted suicide, mutant AU, superhero au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-07 11:37:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matthew is dead and Alfred isn't. That's all there is to it. That's the issue. Therein lies the problem. </p><p>Matthew is dead, and Alfred should be too. But he isn't. </p><p> </p><p>Superhero/Mutant!AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Winthrop

**Author's Note:**

  * For [My brother](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=My+brother).



> **STOP.**
> 
>  
> 
> Go back and reread the warnings up there. 
> 
> Take them seriously. If you feel I need additional warnings, let me know, but do not tell me "I didn't think it would be THAT bad" because I have no control over your expectations. Feel free to backspace at any time if necessary. Apologies for being unbeta'd. No one wants this to show up in thier inbox and be asked to look it over for errors.
> 
> One last warning: this is possibly one of the worst things I've ever written. I'm still sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be one of the most terrible things I've written in a long time and I apologize profusely for it being the first thing I post after such a long absence. 
> 
> This wasn’t sent to my beta, Crystalpurity, because… shit, man, you don’t want this to show up in your inbox and have to read it. At least here people can be like “nope, veto’ing this shit right here.” and click backspace. 
> 
> It's sort of funny. This started out as me simply being disappointed in the superhero tag on A03. Ahaha. Oh, how shit evoles.

This is how Alfred F. Jones’ first ‘Talk’ happens:

The _second_ Talk, the one about sex, had happened when Alfred was thirteen and his mother had set him and Matt down on her lap and told them where babies came from, why condoms were important and how not every girl on birth control was doing it to avoid getting pregnant. That day was also the day he learned that not all people in love were happy there, and not all people in love protected their partners. That was the day he and Matthew sat up straight and pinky swore they would never ever hurt anyone they fell in love with, and just as importantly, they would do their absolute best to take care of anyone whose person in love with them was hurting them. 

The _first_ Talk happened when Alfred was nine. 

Alfred and Matthew had been doing their homework in front of the television. Matthew was doing their homework for reading and history while Alfred worked on their math and science. Once they were both done, they swapped papers, and Alfred would paraphrase Matthew while Matthew copied Alfred’s answers. It made homework go twice as fast, even though every few minutes they would glance up at the television after hearing cue words like ‘tragedy’ ‘vigilante’ ‘murder’ or ‘puppies and kittens.’

The need for the Talk came around when Alfred happened to glance up after the words ‘give a demonstration’ came out of the television. Alfred looked up just in time to see the man on the screen pinch the nose in the middle of his face and drag it horizontally until it rested beside where his ear should have been— but his ear was on his forehead, instead. 

Their mother came quickly when he shrieked. She turned of the television and gathered Alfred and Matthew up in her arms, shushed them both and promised hot chocolate.

“There’s nothing wrong,” she promised. “Some people are just a little different, that’s all. Some people can do things that other people can’t. We’ve all got to live together though. There’s no reason to be scared. They’re not anymore likely to hurt you than anything else you meet.” 

000

This is how it goes:

By the time he’s seven years old, all of Alfred’s permanent teeth have grown in, and Matthew’s have not. Alfred is so proud of it that he resolves to smile every single day, but Matthew cries because he wants his teeth too. Alfred apologizes and only starts smiling again once all of Matthew’s permanent teeth have grown in as well.

Alfred is fourteen now, and it has been three years since his first Talk. He had yet to meet a metahuman. Metahumans kept their powers secret if they can, or so he’d heard. The closest he’d come was a girl with freckles who could wiggle her ears. She had stolen Matthew’s first kiss behind the acorn tree.

For the last three years, his parents had been through a long and tedious divorce. It settled with Alfred and Matthew placed firmly in their mother’s care at age twelve. 

For the last six months Alfred had been in eighth grade with a B-average, enduring two months of being preached to about how he should start to think about college early courtesy of his technology teacher, who insisted on teaching them all how to type despite clearly being able to already. 

For the last three weeks after turning fourteen, Alfred had been visiting the ice cream parlor during his summer afternoons, squished firmly between his twin and the quiet boy they’d met sighing dejectedly and rolling his eyes in the back of the computer lab.

Kiku was a small Japanese boy who fidgeted when he thought no one was looking. He played video games and questioned the nutritional content of the ice cream at the parlor each time they went, but quieted quickly when Alfred told him not to worry about it.

Alfred had been doing exactly that— saying, “God, Kicks, you’re such a fart sometimes. It’s ice cream, a cone every now and then isn’t gonna kill you,” while walking backwards across the road with an eyebrow cocked and cocky behind his glasses, grinning and showing off all his teeth— when the car came.

He heard the horn and stopped only to turn his head and freeze as he saw the oncoming metal beast. He heard Matthew scream his name.

He woke up staring at a while ceiling, thinking, _there’s no way I made it to heaven_ and learning later that no, he hadn’t made it to heaven. He was in a hospital. Aside from the tightly bandaged burns on his arms and chest, he was unharmed. He was a miracle. 

He was alive and Matthew was not.

000

His mother ran through the halls with her hands on her cheeks and swallowed airless gulps of atmosphere. She made the noises, but she did not cry and she did not sleep. She sat in the chair beside his hospital bed and watched a vigil all night long.

His father came in around midnight. Alfred hadn’t seen him for years, but still recognized the heavy footsteps in the front hall. He wants to go to the bathroom and hide all night long, but instead he lets the old man hug him, because his legs are too numb to support the rest of his body.

People swarm their house, brining food and chatting and trying to keep them all distracted from thinking about what had happened. They go to the funeral and they can’t open the casket. Kiku’s family comes by and gives their condolences. Kiku is unharmed, physically, but when he and Alfred stand close together Kiku whispers in the faintest voice, “the car hit you two head-on. There were bits all down the street. _How_ are you alive?” 

Alfred has nothing to say, so they do not speak again.

The casket is buried without ever being opened. It’s indecent, his father says. To open it. It’s indecent. No one wants to see that.

The charge is vehicular manslaughter, taken as a misdemeanor because the driver tried to yield, failed to swerve, failed to slam on his brakes fast enough. It was an automatic, not a stick, and he was going exactly the speed limit.

Alfred looked the term up a legal dictionary once the days stop blurring together and he could feel the ache in his stomach well enough to want eat again, though his fingers still shook as he turned the pages. He took a shower and paused as he looked in the mirror, seeing the dark circles under his eyes and the jagged ribs sticking out of his side in sharp clarity for the very first time. 

One year feels like an extremely short time to rot in jail. 

000

One year passes in a blur. 

Alfred and Kiku do not talk for the rest of summer, and once classes resume, they still avoid each other. Instead, Kiku sometimes shoots him wary looks out of the corner of his dark, slanted eyes and shrinks away whenver they get too close, as though fearing he might be bitten. Kiku transfers to another school over winter break. 

It’s hard to tell when spring comes, but it is spring. Sometimes, events happen which make one day stick out from the others. A girl in his class asking if he and Jean are siblings— that hurt. No one had come and explained the situation to her, and that hurt even more, because Alfred _knew_ there was an announcement at school. Someone must have paid attention. The people who had known him and Matthew certainly had to know. He just couldn’t seem to find them. On the rare occasions he mentioned Matt, he couldn’t bring himself to do it by name, and he soon stopped trying to bring Matthew up at all. Every time he was mentioned, Alfred was greeted with a, “Who?” and it hurt so much he went to the bathroom and puked his way out of the rest of his classes. 

He helps his mother slice tomatoes for dinner one evening, slips and by all means should have cut off a finger. There isn’t a scratch. Not even when he begins intentionally trying to jam the knife into the back of his hand, trying in vain to get cuts like he could when he was little and scraped his knees on the playground. The knife bends.

He goes to the toolchest hidden in the back of a cabinet picks up a hammer. He returns without a single swollen finger, both his kneecaps intact, and a twist in his stomach when he remembers the police admiring the damage done to the Matt-killing car, and how no one could quite figure out what had totaled it.

000

It goes on until summer, and summer is oddly just as unbearable as school was because there’s no one around. Their house is big and empty, all of Matthew’s things have been stuffed in a closet where no one has to look at them and remember. 

Their mother has finally been able to cry with tears. She does it at night, often, just loudly enough that Alfred can hear the faint echoes of it in his bedroom where he stares up at the ceiling, unable to close his eyes for fear of dreaming about two-headed cats and roadsigns with rude words, and misty mountaintops where he finds cellphones that let him hear Matthew’s voice for just a few seconds before the connection breaks and all he can hear is static.

000 

They’re driving late at night, coming home from one of his mother’s friend’s houses in the country. They’re going the speed limit but not really looking at the road. It’s not familiar until it’s an accident.

The deer hits the windshield like a cannonball bursting through the wooden walls of a medieval fortress, except the falling splinters are shards of grass and the whole world spins into a tree. His mother screams and unbuckles her seatbelt, bursting out of the car while Alfred sits, in frozen in the back seat. The bleeding bucking kicking beast is twice his size and he can’t stop staring. Its eye is bleeding, bright red and enraged, like a hell bringer. Its legs thrash and its hoof smashes straight through the window, shattering it with a blow strong enough to crack a skull. 

In a moment the door is ripped away from his side and he’s jerked out of the car by his collar. The seatbelt snags his leg and twists his foot and his mother’s voice is shrill and overpowering in his ears. She holds him in her arms and pulls him away from the car, its headlights still flickering in the dark, illuminating shining shards of glass. 

Four hunters in neon orange vests run out of the wood, breathing hard and gripping their rifles. They began to shout at the sight of the deer, turn to Alfred and his mother, yelling something he can’t seem to understand ( _Is anyone hurt? We could hear all the way from the fence!_ ) over the blood rushing through his ears. His mother shakes her head. 

Her hand came up to cover his eyes but he still knows when one of the hunters raises his gun and shoots the deer through the head. Alfred doesn’t if it was the deer or the sparking, decimated dashboard making the screech of agony he can feel in every inch of his body.

Two of the hunters wrap Alfred and his mother in a blanket from the backseat of their pickup. Those two escort them to the hospital with kind hands and quiet words while the other two hunters dial on their cellphones and speak to men in cars with flashing lights. The nurses taps Alfred’s cheek and he does not feel it. He goes along with what they tell him to do. He can’t bring himself to resist, even when all he feels like doing is sitting still and occasionally blinking. 

He doesn’t remember when he winds up back in his bed with his rocketship blanket and the fake glow-in-the-dark stars plastered on his ceiling in patterns he’d painstakingly replicated from the real night sky. He doesn’t know when he falls asleep, either. All he knows is that in the morning when he wakes, he doesn’t have to go to school. Instead he’s fed bland pancakes doused in more maple syrup than he’s ever used before. There isn’t a scratch on him. His mother, who had a large gash just above her eye and a vicious bruise on her sternum and cheek— she holds him tightly, and he though he knows her arms are around him, he can’t feel it.

000

He doesn’t know quite what possessed him to do it. Alfred just sits down with a piece of paper and a badly chewed number #2 pencil. This is what he writes:

Things I can do:

Starve myself  
Drown  
Burn myself to death  
Hang myself 

Then he stops writing. His mother is calling him downstairs, announcing that it’s dinnertime. We’re going to a new restaurant that had just opened up, she says. They should have all sorts of good food you like. Mashed potatoes, hot turkey sandwiches, cheeseburgers covered in ketchup, lettuce and pickles, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream on top. To celebrate surviving the car crash, she says. 

Alfred shrugs on his coat and glances at the closet where Matthew’s stuffed polar bear is locked in. 

He stumbles downstairs, locks himself in the electric blue rental car, and is driven away.

000

Things I can do (he writes in a school notebook which serves no other function but to appear useful at its place on his desk in the middle row):

Buy ropes without anyone asking me why, and hide them  
Tie a noose right  
Almost chicken out at the last moment only to have it fail anyway

I can’t get hurt  
I should be dead too

000

Alfred cries at Toris’ birthday party. 

Toris is a friend, or at least, they’d known each other since kindergarten. Toris has two little brothers, Eduard and Raivas, and they argue all the time. Petty little arguments: who gets to sit in the front seat when driving to school? Who gets the first scoop of pistachio ice cream? Who _really_ broke the brio set? Who is the most mature? Who gets to hold the remote when they watched television? 

It was Toris’ fifteenth birthday, the arguments still hadn’t stopped, and it was so stupid to get mad at your siblings for such little things that in the final minutes of _Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron_ , (Eduard and Toris’ favorite) Alfred began to cry.

At first, he managed to keep silent, but glasses made hiding tears much more difficult because you had to displace them to rub at your eyes, and people didn’t really buy the ‘something in my eye’ thing when you had two protective glass layers. 

So he couldn’t quash the crying when it first began. Soon his face grew puffy and red, his breath shortened and his throat constricted. 

Alfred stands and walks to the bathroom as steadily as he can. A few people glance at him with concern, but he ignores them and just keeps walking. 

He locks the door once he’s inside and tries not to scream. He tries to not cry loudly enough to be heard through the door, even though a tiny part of him wishes for nothing but to be heard and for the door to be broken down and someone to run in and wrap their arms around him and stay with him the whole night and cry and understand and—

He doesn’t come out of the bathroom until it’s late at night and everyone’s packing up to go home. No one asks where he’s been. 

A part of him thinks, _That’s good. I didn’t disturb anyone._

Another part aches.

000

Things I can do: 

Cry for two hours straight before I get dehydrated enough to pass out  
I can probably dehydrate myself to death  
Listen to the same song on loop for three days

000

Things I can do: (he writes a week later)

Pass math  
Look for spare change  
Buy Toris an icecream, I don’t want him to hate me.

000

Things I can do: (he writes an hour later)

Fuck up at birthday parties so much that Toris doesn’t want to talk to me  
Have panic attacks while trying to cross the street  
Cry in school bathroom stalls  
Try to drown myself in the toilet, except I keep jerking upwards at the last minute.  
Provoke bully into extreme swirly? Too complicated. Must plan again.

000

Things I can do: (a month later)

Get detention for beating up the bully I was trying to provoke into swirly-ing me to death. Need more straight-forward plan.  
I don’t want to burn to death.  
Leave the gas stove on?  
OD on sleeping pills. 

000

Things I can do: 

(he stares at the paper for an hour, got up, leaving it blank, and went to bed. There is nothing he can do.)

000

Things I can do: (he writes on a good day, when Toris finds him crying in the bathroom and wraps his arms around him rather than yelling at him to grow a pair of balls. Toris doesn’t yell at anyone though, so perhaps that’s why he was so kind. Obligation. Obligation. Didn’t want little Alfie in trouble, I’m associated with him now— 

But for whatever reason, Toris finds Alfred in the bathroom and hugs him. He shows Alfred the pearly white scars on his arm. “Down the street,” Toris calls them, and smiles so gently that it’s painful. Somewhere, in the depth of his heart, Alfred still has pain to spare for someone else, and he latches onto it, kissing Toris’ arms and crying over him, wiping his snot on sheets of toilet paper. Toris wipes his eyes and holds Alfred’s head to his chest, and says, “I know. I know. But it gets better if you just hold on long enough. Just hold on and keep trying. Try to get better. Please?” 

He draws butterflies on Alfred’s arms and says, “This one is your mother, this one is your brother, this one is me. We all want you to be happy, Alfred. So when you’re sad, look at the butterflies, okay?” And Alfred. And Alfred. And for Alfred, happiness is so foreign now and far away. Like the dementors in Harry Potter, it feels as if there’s a gray fog over everything and he will _never_ be happy again, how Toris could possibly suggest it is beyond him. Toris never lost a _brother_. It’s different. It’s different. 

Like Alfred is. 

Like his skin, his skin which makes it so fucking hard to hurt himself, is different.) 

_Things I can do:_

_Talk to Toris  
Call a doctor_

000

He calls a metahuman he met at the hospital. 

Alfred still isn’t on the register, but that might just be because the hospital has a confidentiality policy. He isn’t entirely sure he wants to be on the register. There are stories floating around the internet about how metahumans were always the first to get draft notices and the first to get arrested when a little too close to crime scenes, but that could all be just scare tactics. He doesn’t know how much he cares anymore. He only cares enough to make the call on his own.

Alfred looks up the hospital’s number in the phone book and enquires about the metahuman. He learns again that his name is Francis Bonnefoy and he’s doing volunteer work for all the local hospitals in the area. He’s on call at all hours. He hasn’t got any family to speak of, but many, many friends who pool money to get him a small apartment and enough pocket change to buy groceries and little indulgences, so Bonnefoy is, in fact, on call all hours of the day.

He’s a sedative. That’s all Alfred remembers. A walking sedative who woke up beside Alfred and made his heart beat slowly even as he first asked, “Where’s my brother?” and got the answer, “Oh, dear, I’m so _sorry_.” 

“I’m not a therapist,” Mr. Bonnefoy says when Alfred calls. The front desk gave him the number easily. Now, he curls on his bed in his room a few days later, listening to the affected voice coming through the phone. “Are you sure you don’t want me to recommend you to a professional?” 

Alfred grunts a ‘no’ as a reply. He’s been lying down all day. It takes all his energy just to reach the phone. He didn’t really feel like talking all that much, which was strange, as he’d very quietly told Mr. Bonnefoy how it was the third time he’d tried to kill himself and been stopped by his powers or some weird sort of cowardice or a sudden burst of insanity, and he didn’t want to try even more painful deaths that might work. He didn’t even want to get up from his pillows. He wanted to close his eyes, see Matthew again and have it be done with. He’d made the call though, and now he didn’t feel like hanging up, either. He just let Mr. Bonnefoy keep on talking, only partly listening to what was said.

“You list things?” Francis says. “That’s wonderful. Do you think you can do something for me with your lists, then?”

Alfred grunts a “What?” over the phone. 

“Once a day, every day, I want you to list things you’re glad you have. It doesn’t matter what it is. It can be anything, like the lint in your pockets or the things you own or people you know. And it’s okay if you repeat yourself from list-to-list, all right? Don’t worry about that. I just want you to do your best and try to write at least one thing down every day. Can you do that?” 

“I guess,” Alfred says. 

“Thank you,” says Bonnefoy.

Eventually the conversation dwindles. Bonnefoy tells him to call anytime. That there is no hour of the day he’s unavailable. The line dies soon after, and Alfred lays in the silence of his room, listening to the sound of nothing. 

000

A man is hit by a train in the subway, scrambling to save his life and screaming for help, and no one helped him. Alfred thinks of bystander syndrome and fear-induced paralysis, and he thinks of the terror of being about to be hit and not being able to do anything, and the certainty of death. He thinks about the people on the platform who watched it, the children who saw their parents do nothing as a man was crushed and no one did anything about it when _they could have done everything._

He hears about it while sitting in a restaurant, eating dinner late at night beside his mother and one of her friends. He tries to finish his fried rice but ends up crying instead, quiet little sobs too quiet to really be heard, and his tears splatter on the table and he can’t find them anymore. His mother is the first to notice, and she wraps an arm around him and holds him to her side comfortingly. 

The other patrons just stare, like they’ve never seen a person cry before. 

Alfred ignores them and thinks to himself, _if only I’d been there. If I’d been there, I would have tried to pull him out of the way. Or I’d have at least jumped in front with him, so he wouldn’t think he was dying alone with no one caring._

000

Alfred is sixteen when he witnesses his first crime. 

It’s not a bad street. It’s not on bad side of town. It’s not even badly lit, it’s just a bad situation is all. There are only one or two other people on the street, but it’s a residential area and not all of the lights in the windows high above are out yet. The curtains aren’t even drawn on some of them. It’s a warm summer night, Alfred has two years left of high school ( _God, I can’t make it_ ) and there is a man holding a woman by her wrists, his face so close to hers and pushing up their thighs together. 

When Alfred takes his headphones off his ears, he can hear a very faint, “Ken, stop, I told you I don’t want to. _Stop it_.”  and then, “you owe me, c’mon.” 

There’s temptation. There’s almost overwhelming temptation to put his headphones back on, blast the Lincoln Park and forget the sinking feeling in his gut. Let the lady deal with it on her own. It’s none of my business. She’ll handle it. I probably misunderstood. No skin off my back. Someone else will come.

But when the man begins pushing the lady towards a darker corner of the street where Alfred thinks there might be an alley, all he can think of is that the woman is in a subway tunnel and the man is a train rushing right at her, and there are so many people doing nothing when they could be doing _everything._

He turns and marches towards the couple, and when the man pulls out a cigarette lighter it burns Alfred just as much as it would have anyone else, and his hair is pulled out and his eye stings where fingers were jabbed in, but it buys the lady enough time to jerk her wrists away from the man and his handsome face and run, run as fast as she can, and soon the police are showing up and he’s arrested for assault until he can prove it was in another’s defense and— 

And it’s all far, far more than worth it when the woman tell him—Lily, her name is Lily. 

Lily tells him: “thank you.”

That makes it entirely worth it.

Lily tells him: “my brother’s going to take care of me for a while. I’ll be safe with him.” 

Alfred asks, “You’re going home to your brother?” 

She nods, and Alfred doesn’t even realize how nervous she must have been until so much later because that’s what makes it worth it, above and beyond, wholly, unconditionally worth it.

His eye is still stinging but that is when he brings his hands up to his face and begins to sob and says, “take good care of your brother too, okay?” 

She might have said something else, but blood is rushing through his ears and Alfred doesn’t take his hands down from his face for a very long time, and when he finally does, Lily isn’t there anymore. 

She’s gone home to her brother. He let a sibling have their sibling. 

His heart is twisting in ways he didn’t know it could, and it hurts so much and in such a good way he wants to jump and scream and fall on his knees and sob and dig a hole to China and thank _God_ and he wonders what it’s like on medication but he’s so sure there’s no way he would be able to feel so intensely if they had and _fuck_.

He pulls out his little listing journal and his little black pen and writes in the biggest letters he can. 

I SAVED THEIR SIBLING  
THEY’RE BOTH OKAY BECAUSE OF ME  
I SAVED SOMEONE’S MATTHEW!!!

000

When his mother comes to embrace him, he can hug back. 

When he's released from police custody, he has a few hours of euphoria left until the middle of the night when the high ends, and he crashes back down to earth. 

He's saved someone, but it isn't his brother, and Lily could be hit by a truck on the crosswalk tomorrow and it would have all been for nothing. 

He could save a thousand Lilys, and Matthew still wouldn't come back.

000


	2. Cordova

In the middle of the night, Alfred crashes—hard. He couldn’t save _his_ Matthew and that’s what makes him the most despicable human being on Earth. He slinks downstairs, turns on the stovetop and lays his hands down on them.

He bites his lips (his skin does not break no matter how hard he bites) and hopes the new burns will just be thought of as more damage done by the man’s lighter—Ken. His name was Ken. 

Alfred holds his hands up in front of himself, gasping and panting until he can reach the bathroom and turn on the sink with his burnt fingers. Holding his hands under the water, he at least feels a little less like a fucker and a little more like an atoner. 

As he stumbles back up the stairs, clutching his hands to his chest and whimpering, he realizes that he hasn’t felt numb all night. 

He waits for the swoop of lethargy. It arrives the following morning once his hands have been bandaged and he’s gone through the appropriate motions to content his mother that really, he’s fine, he just wants to be in bed for a few more hours. 

Around midday, he decides he might as well do his gratefulness entry to keep Mr. Bonnefoy happy, but when he turns to the last page he wrote on— 

I SAVED THEIR SIBLING  
THEY’RE BOTH OKAY BECAUSE OF ME  
I SAVED SOMEONE’S MATTHEW!!!

—he…

…

…

(he writes, in the tiniest letters he can, _I saved someone’s Matthew last night_ and for a little while longer, Alfred is at peace.)

000

He remembers the police questioning him and not much else. He’s not called back to the station. He is called into court, once, briefly, to give a testimony. What was Lily wearing? Was she leading Ken on? What were they doing previously? 

Alfred says he doesn’t know, he didn’t think so. He just heard ‘stop’ and decided to interfere when it didn’t look like Ken would, because ‘no’ means ‘no.’ That’s what he says. It sounds so much cooler than he feels. He sound suave, secure guy. Like some kind of vigilante hero who just goes around punishing criminals wherever they may be and turning them in to the cops with no regard for his own personal safety. 

He is not that. Sometimes he finds himself imagining being a brave, cool, strong hero. When he remembers that he isn’t, he lies down on the couch for hours trying to figure out why he could save Lily but not his own brother.

He gets a _Lord of the Rings_ movie for his—and Matthew’s— birthday. Birthdays are hard. 

Birthdays are really hard.

He smiles at his cousin Alejandro and says ‘thank you’, even though he’s never read any of the _Lord of the Rings_ books, it was Matt that did, but people got them mixed up all the time. He tries to ignore any lingering sting. Still, it’s three hours of mind-numbing escape, even though he pauses it every ten minutes to get up and pace. At one point, he spends half an hour in the bathroom splashing himself with icy water. Alfred watches the movie as well as he can, even though it’s impossible to really enjoy.

_You wish now that our places had been exchanged. That I had died and Boromir had lived._

_Yes. I wish that._

000

It’s sudden and a little unexpected, but Alfred has a run-in with Siddhartha Gautama in his history textbook one night while reading up on colonialism. It gets some crazy ideas in his head about enlightenment and the spirit world and his human-ness here on earth. There aren’t any Buddhist temples around though, so Alfred starts going to church instead. 

He has no idea what denomination it is, but it’s something in Christianity. He doesn’t know much about the different sorts of Christianity, but he knows Francis Bonenfoy, the metahuman from the hospital, is Catholic. He knows the lady at the icecream shop Alfred doesn’t go to anymore had a large beaded cross hanging around her neck and occasionally spoke in tongues. His government teacher has a philosophy degree, is Atheist, and stresses that according to Pascal, being Agnostic and being Atheistic are the same thing, at which point everyone stops listening. Alfred’s mother is some sort of Protestant-turned-Agnostic, his father was raised Old Order Mennonite, and that’s the extent of his knowledge. 

The church is small and made of white stone. The bell tower doesn’t have a bell in it. He decides it’s denomination-less when he realizes he doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t know exactly what denomination _he_ is, either. Alfred sits through the sermons politely each Sunday, and sometimes he even agrees with what’s being said. He buys a little iron cross necklace which he wears under his tee-shirts and coats. He isn’t entirely sure about Heaven and Hell, much less Purgatory, which he’s never really heard much about, but he decides to draw butterflies on his hand and pretend the one that looks most like a bird is Matthew. Matthew, like a ghost, like an angel, watching him throughout the day.

There’s a little table near the back of the church. It’s shaped sort of like the bleachers at football games, each ridge a little minitable where things can be set. They use it for candles. 

There are three types of candles, two little ones and one big one. The little ones come in blue and red holders, the big ones come in green. A little candle is one dollar, a big green one is two dollars, and all the funds go to a charity Alfred thinks he’s heard of before. It goes to the kids in Haiti, the ones still trying to rebuild after the earthquake. Every Sunday after a service he can only sort-of listen to, he approaches the back table, pays a dollar for a little red candle, sets it on the bleacher-table, and lights it up. 

_This is Matthew’s candle_ he thinks, _as long as I’ve got this, he’s still sort of with me._

He still writes Francis’ lists. On Sundays, only on Sundays, he writes two things instead of just one. Sometimes he writes, _I’m glad for chocolate bars,_ or _songbirds_ or _people left me alone today_ or _people paid attention to me today_. Then he writes, _and candles for Matthew_.

000

Oh, God, the good days are still so long.

000

One Saturday afternoon it’s a relatively slow news day. It’s especially obvious because the newest assault-by-metahuman story is on every single one of the channels.

_—has declined to comment. The metahuman’s family claims that he believed Beilshmidt was trying to break in. The ‘retaliation’ resulted in a case of minor frostbite, which will fortunately not cost Beilschmidt any of his limbs. Mr. Beilschmidt says that while his charge’s actions were poor, he does not believe such violent response was necessary, though he doesn’t plan to press charges due to—_

There’s nothing to do but watch news and read comic books about people with lots of money putting on pjs and fighting crime on the streets using secret identities. As he watches news and reads the comics, an egg quietly hatches in the back of his mind and another idea is born.

000

He needs a mask, first of all. A mask and something to hide his hair, not only to avoid recognition, but also because when people pulled his hair it _hurt_. 

Alfred gets a mask at a costume store. He’s read _Watchmen_ , all of it, and knows to not get the type with a band. Instead he buys the stage-type gummy glue stuff, which adheres the thing to his face, so he won’t be blinded by the mask being tugged only partway off if someone gives it a tug. He invests in colored contacts which turn his eyes orange, so he doesn’t have to worry about being blind without his glasses.

He chooses a red hoodie and ripped up jeans for the rest of his outfit. He pulls the hoodie’s band as tightly as he can and ties it so the hood doesn’t slip off his head. Red, because of Matthew’s candles and Matthew’s favorite color, and Matthew’s random quip when they were twelve about how the Red Coats wore their red coats so no one could tell if they were injured or not. Mostly though, he chooses it because Matt.

He doesn’t think of a code name. That was the media’s job. He doesn’t think of how stupid the idea of being a vigilante is, because even just thinking about it gives him a little jolt, and that little jolt is more powerful than anything he’s felt after so long. The jolt brings him back to the night with Lily and her brother and the euphoria he felt when he realized _I saved someone’s Matthew_. 

He doesn’t question if it’s wrong to do what might be called ‘charitable acts’ if he does them for his own selfish reasons. He doesn’t question it because even if it’s for the wrong reason, he’s trying to help, and if he doesn’t try to help then maybe no one will.

He can’t let himself be helpless again.

000

The first time, he’s out late and prowling the streets of the city it’s December and he’s trying to get the leaden weight out of his stomach. It’s sort of working. The more he walks the better he feels, and the walking and the looking and the watching are taking his mind off things. 

He peeks into alleys and down the backstreets and into the dirtier, scarier parts of town. There are people who look terrifying, covered in barbed-wire-and-teardrop tattoos, ragged, with their eyes sunk deep into their skulls. They aren’t doing anything though, so Alfred turns and walks away after a while. He meets one or two people who he thinks might be drug dealers, but he doesn’t actually see them deal anything and he might’ve had one or two trysts with marijuana when Matt was still around, so he doesn’t want to harry on anyone for anything less than crack. He walks back onto the other streets, hides among the few people still bustling along at night ( _It’s a small city,_ he thinks _Of course there isn’t going to be something going on in the back allies every single night. Stupid._ ) and tries to hide his face and mask in shadow while embarrassment creeps up his spine. 

He checks his watch. It’s one in the morning and he’s got a math test tomorrow. No big deal, it’s _math_. He’d maybe screw up once or twice and only write down one answer when there should’ve been two, or put _equals_ when he means _about_ , but shit. It was a math test. He could puke after lunch and be sent home and catch up on his sleep if he wanted and… 

Alfred sighs, sticks his hands in his pockets and returns home. He takes off the hoodie and the mask and the contacts, slides them all in the bottom drawer of his dresser, and doesn’t touch them again for two months. 

000

He finds the aftermath of a beating around ten at night in early March. He isn’t wearing his hoodie-and-mask. Maybe if he were he would’ve been at the alley earlier and done something, but no, he was out buying poster board, emergency coffee rations, and candy bars for a science project due tomorrow that he had procrastinated on until now, having only gotten the motivation to do about an hour prior. 

He took a shortcut home because it was cold. He’d turned because he heard someone cough and wow, God, his heart is in his throat and he feels the cross under his tee-shirt and wishes he were really religious so he could pray.

It’s a man in the alley. His face is hidden but the faintest, ragged breathing is still audible. His leg is bent an unnatural way and his arms are bare. What must be his jacket is sticking out of the dumpster beside him with its pockets turned out and a rip up the side. There’s blood on the ground, and now that Alfred sees it, he can smell it too. 

Alfred’s hand goes for his cellphone. Then he stops. 

_I’m already on record,_ he thinks. _I’m on record for beating a guy to shit in defense of another. They’ll think I lied the first time. They’ll think I did this. I’m gonna be taken in for assault._

He looks for a street sign and reads the name, memorizing it as fast as he can. He dashes to the first payphone he can find, puts a hand over his mouth, and tries to alter his voice without making it sound unnatural. He calls 9-1-1 and says, “Come to Monterray St. right away, hurry. There’s a guy in an alley and he’s bleeding really badly. I didn’t look, but there’s blood and he’s breathing weird. No, ma’am, I didn’t see any weapons. No, ma’am, I don’t know who he is. Yes, I’ll stay with him.”

He hangs up and dashes home, his plastic bags hanging off his arms are swinging dangerously and threatening to rip by the time he reaches the safety of his room. He hopes that the man survives, even though Alfred wasn’t there to sit with him. He purposefully avoids the news for several days, just in case a report comes up and he has to wonder whether or not it’s his presence or lack of it that kills people.

000

He decides to try the vigilante thing. Just one more time. 

It’s in March still. Mid March, so he’s not the only one still wearing a hoodie. He patrols the streets, revisiting the places he knows he’s met bad news on and the places he knows are in the worse part of town. 

It’s around eleven at night when he sees another hooded figure start running, shoving what looks like a long-strapped purse into a backpack. He glances in and sees a woman and she holds up her hands and says, “He just took everything I have, I swear! I don’t have anything else!” 

His heart jumps into his throat again. Alfred turns and chases the retreating figure. He wants to shout, ‘hey, you! Stop! You!’ but he knows he can’t and shouldn’t. It would just make the mugger run faster and people would hear him and someone might recognize his voice and the secret identity is part of the _point_.

So Alfred just runs. He runs until his legs start to ache— an inside ache, he can hardly remember the feel of an ache from the outside anymore— and his breathing gets harsh and ragged. Gasping in the cold March air feels like knives in his lungs, even though the rest of him is overheated and being poked by pins and needles from within. The chase was only a few minutes down the sidewalk, but he’s already lost sight of the mugger and all he can do is put his hands on his knees and heave. 

He heaves and heaves until he actually—without any help from his finger— _heaves_ and pukes on the sidewalk. He empties his stomach completely until it feels like he’s emptied out his entire body and he’s just a walking shell, making space for a rolling, curling anger that hadn’t lived there before.

“Hey, mom?” he asks the next morning after BS’ing his way out of school early again. He’d turned in all his homework first. The teachers all know he fakes, but if he leaves then he’s one less student to worry about, so they just shake their heads and mark him down to a C on his reports for lack of class participation.

“Yes?” his mother says. She’s reading a book. She’d taken to getting lost in them lately, when she wasn’t working or cooking or sleeping or— he didn’t really know what his mother did, really. She worked and cooked and slept, and when she wasn’t doing that, she read. That’s all he knew.

“Can I get a membership at the Y? How much does that cost?” 

“Why do you want to go?” she asks. 

“I think working out more might improve my heath some. I might not puke as much.”

He doesn’t know if his mother takes that as a bribe or if she genuinely believes it when he comes home claiming to be sick. He doesn’t ask her and she doesn’t question his frequent visits to the school nurse. She buys him a season membership to the Y and Alfred goes there every day to work out. He tries to eat a few more greens and nuts and a few less chocolate bars, and sometimes he almost feels good. 

Much of his time at the Y is spent on the treadmill, seeing how fast he can run for how long. He looks up average run times online and tries to beat them. He starts buying energy bars and granola instead of Hershey’s. He joins a Tuesday night kickboxing class with Toris. He stays out late most nights patrolling the streets; sometimes he catches someone, sometimes he doesn’t, and sometimes he has to run midway through retribution to dash away from the cop car that just turned the corner. Most nights, he gets home sore and exhausted and he falls into a dreamless sleep. Not every night, though. 

One night he dreams of Matthew cradling his head. Just cradling him. Alfred is lying on his back with his arms crossed over his chest, his head is lying in Matthew’s lap and Matthew’s hands are by his ears, his thumbs rubbing Alfred’s cheeks. 

They’re the same age in the dream, even though Matthew still has their haircut from seventh grade. It’s the haircut that got into the yearbook that year and it’s the haircut Matthew has on the picture in the hall of the pony rides at a birthday party. This Matthew has round, wire-framed glasses and is still carrying around his little white polar bear teddy. The bear is sitting beside Matthew, animate, as Matt rubs Alfred’s scalp and mumbles words too quiet to make out. 

Alfred is lying on his back, looking up at Matthew and there are stars in the sky behind them, not buildings. Alfred knows there are stars even though he doesn’t look at them, because he’s looking at Matthew, and he knows Matthew came down from the stars to come see him. There’s an apartment building in those stars. It’s made up of dust and time, twinkling space gems and antimatter. Matthew lives there. He has a shower with great pressure and unlimited heat, friends on every hallway, and a receptionist who chews pink bubblegum and speaks in a vague, uninterested drone like the lady who does voice work for Verizon.

Alfred is lying on his back, looking up at Matthew and he says, “Mattie, you’re dead,” but it’s also a question and also a plea and he’s also saying _I love you I miss you I want you I need your help I can’t live without my other half_ and _you fucker_ at the same time, even though he isn’t actually saying any of that. 

He doesn’t hear Matthew’s voice. He’s forgotten it, he realizes. The face he stares up at is the one he sees in the mirror each day, but with a shitty haircut from years ago cut and pasted on from a yearbook photo. 

Still, he knows it with every ounce of his soul, in every molecule of air in his lungs, and in the very marrow of his bones that it is Matthew who speaks; it is Matthew who says:

“What are you talking about, Alfie? If I were _really_ dead, I couldn’t be here right now.”

000

He lights a candle for Matthew on Sunday at the little denomination-less church. As many nights a week as he can, he pulls on his red hoodie and mask and trades his glasses for orange contact lenses, and if he sees something wrong he does his best to stop it. He lives and breathes for those Sundays and late nights. They pull him through the last year of high school when he wants nothing more than to rip out the floor tiles and smash all the windows in the building with his bare hands.

He writes two full ‘thankfulness’ journals, and even though he doesn’t call Bonnefoy up anymore, he drops them off at the hospital before stopping buy a staples to buy a new notebook. The journals are wrapped in a brown paper bag and signed ‘ _go buy yourself a coffee or something –A.F.J._ ’ with a twenty dollar bill snuck between the pages. 

Stuck in the back of the second journal is a Calvin and Hobbes strip, illegally photocopied and cut out. It’s the raccoon one— “ _in a sad, awful, terrible way, I’m happy I met him. What a stupid world._ ” 

Even though he doesn’t want people to be sad, he hopes it makes Bonnefoy cry, so he won’t be the only one. 

He hits senior year and starts applying for colleges, setting his sights on a nearby community one because even though he wants to make more money than he can with a high school degree, he doesn’t really know what the wants to _do_. But everyone’s applying, so he does too, and he decides to not really mind the results.

What he cares for more is that there’s a cute guy at the coffee shop. A guy. A _man_. 

Alfred lays in bed thinking about him one night, when suddenly he realizes he’s stroking himself off to the thought of the guy’s naked body and chest hair and giant cock and oh, oh— _that’s_ why he was never interested in girls. It seems profound for some reason. That’s why he wasn’t interested in girls. Like, holy shit.

He applies for a job at the coffee shop and gives his first blowjob in the backroom during a break. That’s also where he receives his first blowjob. They exchange numbers and break up two months later, leaving Alfred sobbing in bed for three days. He ignores the Y and his diet and he goes back to eating ice cream and candy bars, even though the reason they broke up was that Alfred didn’t have many nights free because he wanted to go vigilanting, but he couldn’t really tell anyone about that so, well, he didn’t.

It gets better once he starts going back to working out, eating more greens and nuts again, and doing what it is he lost his boyfriend for. That is, saving Matties.

In January he gets enrolled in community college for the coming fall. It’s in a different city. A bigger one. Forty minutes down the road, so even though he loudly declares his hatred of driving, his parents work together for once and buy him a white 1995 Hyundai for graduation. Then they take him out (separately) for pasta, steak and chocolate cake for lunch, dinner and desert respectively. They set aside a piece for Matthew without saying it outright. Alfred eats a pint of pecan ice cream in Matt’s honor, but he does it in the safety of his own home. He takes the night off of work and vigilanting, sleeping off his stomach ache instead. 

He saves up his tips and pay over the summer and gets another job in the city his college is in. It’s called Begininsberg. After he gets another job, again at a coffee shop, he also gets an apartment in Begininsberg, so that once the move is over he’ll be independent and won’t be obligated to keep the car. 

His father comes to help him move out. His mother helps him buy necessities: a couch and pots and pans and bathroom supplies and a book on DIY house maintenance. They stuff it all in the trunk and carefully avoid too much eye contact, either because they’re tearing up or awkward, or maybe his parents are still angry with each other. It’s hard to tell. Alfred doesn’t want to stand between them, so he goes inside and does one last look-around to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything.

Before he leaves his mother’s house for the last time, he asks for a picture of Matthew. Just a yearbook picture, maybe. Or a copy of the family photo hanging in the hall they don’t really avoid anymore. His mother says yes, of course, oh baby, and gives him the one where Matthew is thirteen and it’s their birthday party, both grinning with identical haircuts. The longer Alfred looks at the picture, the more he thinks the little Matthew grinning out at him has wire-rimmed glasses, more defined cheekbones, with a smile just a little more full of pride. 

He slides the picture in the last duffle bag. The duffle bag stuffed with a red hoodie and a shitty five-dollar mask, gummy glue and a box of contacts, and a battered, moth-eaten polar bear teddy he took from the hallway closet without permission.

He slings the bag over his shoulder, gives his parents one last goodbye, puts the bag in the backseat of the Hyundai, and waves out the window at his childhood home. 

Without really thinking about it and speaking mostly to himself, he mutters, “Let’s get out of here, bro.”

He almost thinks he hears a voiceless voice respond, “Just start driving, okay, Alfie?”

And Alfred smiles. He checks his mirrors, resolves to go at least ten below the speed limit, and takes a bit out of a granola bar hidden in the glove box. He fidgets with the duffle bag behind his seat until he manages to dig out Matthew’s picture. He rolls down the windows, turns up the volume and blasts _Born to Run_ all the way down the highway, Matthew’s picture resting on the passenger seat beside him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today was okay, and so am I. 
> 
>  
> 
> I have no idea when part 3 will be uploaded, but the title will be Point Hope. Does anyone see my trend? Hint: Indigo
> 
> Still not sending this trilogy to Crystalpurity because shit, you still don't want this kind of stuff to show up in your inbox, so it's unbeta'd.
> 
> Calvin and Hobbes, The Dead Raccoon: http://calvinandhobbes-daily.tumblr.com/post/19577066756/c-h-baby-raccoon-storyline
> 
> Axis Powers Hetalia (c) Hidekaz Himaruya  
> Concept and Writing (c) beabae
> 
> One cat threw his back out and another one has an UTO. I'm doing commissions to try and help cover the medical costs and get spare change in college. If anyone's interested in commissioning me for visual art or literature, there's information on my deviantart: https://beabae.deviantart.com/journal/I-m-doing-commissions-309872949


	3. Point Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey little darling  
> There's something that you should know  
> This thin is gonna haunt every soul  
> This thing, it won't let us go.

000

The community college Alfred went to didn’t have anything in the way of clubs, but there was a group of people in his biology class (which was extraordinarily harder than his high school class, even though it was just community college) who got together once a week to talk about comics for an hour. They gathered just after the 2:00 class ended on Wednesday, and Alfred had forty-five minutes after the end of class before he needed to rush off to the coffee shop. They were a nice enough group: a mostly boys with big hands and sunglasses, but also a small handful of tough, stubborn girls willing to cheer for Tempest and loudly and eagerly await the release of the first all-girl herosquad debuting in April. 

It was from one of the girls— a blond music major named Kathy, a self-proclaimed feminist who cosplayed on weekends and didn’t let any of the boys ever question her enjoyment of comics— that Alfred learned that real-life masked heroes are kind of a thing.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, offering him a bag of chips one warm Wednesday afternoon. Alfred had twenty minutes before he had to run off to work, but it was a slow day for any of the comics he was interested in and all the others group members were cluttered around the benches outside the science building, arguing which of two maskedmen Alfred’s never paid attention to would win in a fight. “There’s like this whole underground movement ‘been going on ever since, like, the 1940s when people first started doodling the characters punching Hitler and stuff. Now there’s a couple underground rings supposedly. You’d never really think it, but when everyone who does stuff like that are totally set in the ‘don’t talk about my secret identity at all’ thing, no one talks about it at all. So yeah. Crazy secret mask rings. There’s a whole war against crime going on right under our noses.”

“That sounds so Cats&Dogs,” Alfred said. 

Kathy dropped the bag of chips laughing and said, “That is exactly like what it is.”

Alfred grinmed and trotted off to work a little while later; pretending everyone he passed had a secret identity and a thirst for justice, just like him.

000

He sold the Hyundai as soon as he had established himself. He used the money to buy a bicycle and a season pass to a local gym. Where he couldn’t ride, he walked, and his classes had become much more tolerable now that they weren’t every day of the week and he had a long break period between them, though the homework took up so much more time than he was used to that he decided the next semester the only thing to do would be take fewer classes. 

Low credit load. Full-time job. Vilgilanting at night. 

The next few years will be fun, he told himself. The stress built up sometimes. There were days when he jumps three feet out of his skin every time someone honked their car horn. He couldn’t ride his bike on those days. He couldn’t walk on the edge of the sidewalk. Crosswalks took steel. Some days he just didn’t go to class, but he always made sure he got up the next day. No lying down for more than one day. He had to get back up again quickly, or else he feared he never would.

The problem with cars was that they were everywhere. He hadn’t tried to drown himself since his Junior year in high school. He hadn’t really even though about suicide once he started getting good at vigilanting: once he learned how to move in shadow, how to spot trouble a mile away, how to beat a person down without seriously injuring them and how to stalk someone down an alley without being seen. The problem with cars is that they made him think of death, and cars are everywhere.

He wasn’t as bad as he could have been. Not as bad as he was. He didn’t go near cars for a week after the accident that killed Mattie. He would have stayed away for longer had he not been forced to climb into one for the funeral. Afterwards, it had all been about adapting.

Sometimes, when a car went whistling by at what seemed like fifty-sixty-seventy miles per hour, he remembered the deer flying through the windshield at his mother, and the car hurtling towards himself and Matt, and the crashes in every movie car chase that made him close his eyes and put his head down until it was all over. 

Sometimes he flinched. If he was walking with anyone, they would inevitably ask, “Dude? You okay?” 

He would have to reply, “Nothing. Just got poked by something. That’s all.”

000

There were gangs in the area: he wasn’t sure of the exact number, but there were enough of them to make a war, so at least two. Alfred still went out each evening to tour the streets around shelters and dumpsters. The streets which were littered with needles and loose newspapers. He tried to avoid the gangs when he could, but if some of those guys he beat to shit for molest, or the pair of muggers whose noses he broke, or the dicks with the knives last September were members of a gang? Well shit, it happened.

Mostly, Alfred tried to focus more on his day-to-day tasks. He took it one day at a time so much that sometimes he forgot what happened the day before. To help keep himself on track, he bought a calendar and filled it in religiously. Then, all he had to do was check the date on his watch and he was a-okay to go on with the week. As long as he stuck to the schedule, he thrived and he didn’t have to think too hard about anything overly upsetting. 

For four days a week, he worked at a coffee shop a few blocks away from the college. He knew the names of all his coworkers and regulars. He knew how to make the best iced coffee and latte art just like he knows the best way to bring a person to their knees in less than three seconds. He moved on from kickboxing after getting his apartment—after four years, he felt he was rather good at it—and joined a small novelty shootboxing class in the local gym, because it looked cool and their weight divisions used to go from Junior Sparrowweight to Super Eagleweight, and who didn’t want to say they were ranked Super Eagleweight?

At first it was hard to adapt to being allowed to uses his knees, standing submissions, and sweeps, since he couldn’t do that in his kickboxing class, but it wasn’t so different that he couldn’t adapt. 

Adapt. 

He focused on sweeps and standing submissions the most, and by spring the class was canceled and he moved on to combat grappling, where he got to punch and kick and wrestle partly naked sweaty people. By the time he was good enough that he didn’t even really have to remind his body what to do when he was assaulted, he had enough free space in his mind that he was dealing with sexual frustration that couldn’t be entirely be worked out with rosie palms. 

He bought a vibrator, restocked his spirit gum and makeup—to make it look like he was actually getting bruises from his MMA classes—and made coffee between doing smatterings of homework. He took the least number of credits he could, all mandatory classes, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still hard to keep up.

With final exams coming up in May, he got a call from his mother who asked him if he planned to come home for summer. 

He said he would visit, but no. No, he’s not going back to that town for long. Now that he’s tasted living at night with adrenaline pumping through his veins, having money in his pocket and the definitive knowledge that there are others—justice fighters out there—like him—there’s no way he can stay in that little town for very long ever again.

000

He took a part time job in a warehouse for the summer in addition to his coffee shop job. In total, he took four days off: two days to visit his mother, one for a luncheon with his father, one for Mattew’s anniversary. When he signed up for fall classes, he chose as few courses as possible again. He found choosing a course in economics for his math credit was a much easier decision than trying to pick which literature class he knew he didn’t want to be in. He kept in contact with Kathy-from-the-comic-book-group, and sometimes he pretended he had a group of friends to share his secret with when he went to fight the night. 

Then, one horribly muggy night in late June, Alfred found him. 

The man was small, blond, covered in blood and lying in a dumpster. 

His eyes—a startling, bright green—fluttered open and shut. Though barely conscious, when Alfred mutters, “Holy shit, dude. Okay. I’m going to get you to a hospital okay?” the man could still muster himself enough to say, “No.” 

So Alfred, helpless to take the man to a hospital and unwilling to leave him in a dumpster, slid the stranger over his back and carried him back to his apartment instead. He called one of his friends, a lifeguard and volunteer first-responder. 

Elizabeta arrived just after Alfred wiped the last of the glue from his face. The first thing she said was, “Where is he?” 

Alfred pointed her to the bedroom and said, “Please, please don’t tell anyone. I didn’t know what to do.” 

“You should have brought him to the hospital!” Eliza hissed the minute she saw the battered body. “Get me a basin of warm water and some clean towels, I’ve got the rest.” She began stripping the unconscious man without hesitation. 

“He told me not to bring him to the hospital,” Alfred said as he carried in three large towels and the biggest pot he had, filled the pot to the brim with lukewarm water. “I… I thought maybe he was running from someone. Like, an abusive parent or something.” 

Eliza sighed and pulled a sponge out of the medical case she brought in with her. She stripped the unconscious man soundly. First his shirt, then his pants, and soon he was naked but for his boxers. They lay him down on one of the towels and, after pulling on a pair of latex gloves, Eliza wiped the blood away with the second towel. 

Even on the towels, the blood was bright red, and it’s in the man’s blond hair and on his hands, and on Alfred’s clothes where he had carried him to the apartment.

Suddenly, Alfred’s stomach was swimming and he was drowning in the memory of helplessness. 

“I, uh. I’ve got issues with blood, Liz. Call me if you need anything, okay?” 

Eliza hummed something in response, too preoccupied with her work to respond properly. Alfred left as fast as he thought he could without upsetting his stomach more. He dumped his bloody clothes in the laundry basket, snatched a washcloth and scrubbed his skin with dish soap until he couldn’t smell anything but artificial lime. Then, he wiped himself off, tugged on clean clothes, sat down on the bed and tried to get the image of the bloodied body out of his mind.

(Matthew invaded his mind at the most inconvenient times. The thought of him sprawled out, bloody on the street, what did it look like? hadn’t haunted Alfred in weeks.)

He scrambled for distractions and found his homework, but it wasn’t very long before Eliza called out his name. He steeled himself, taking a few deep breaths before shuffling back to the part of the apartment where the stench of iron is most overpowering. 

“Hey, what’s up?” Alfred said, his head airy and his voice a little slurred with distraction. 

Eliza stood beside the man— now substantially less bloody—and the stack of ruined towels and clothes, slowly turning brown. The contents of her medical bag were partly scattered over the room and through the window in the corner of the room, the world looks as thick, as black and as choking as molasses. 

“He’s not as bad as it looked like,” Eliza said. “It doesn’t look like he actually lost that much blood, even though…” she glanced sideways at the pile of stained cloth. “He probably fainted from stress or exhaustion and he’ll be out for a little while longer, but there shouldn’t be any brain damage or anything. He does have some nasty looking cuts, but it’s mostly lots of bruising and a bad sprain. Probably a violent robbing or something; fortunately I can’t find anything internal. He should be okay if he just stays perfectly still for a two to four weeks.”

Alfred nodded. “Thanks, Liz… can you not tell anyone about this? I don’t want the landlord to get pissy. Uh. He doesn’t exactly like it when I bring people in from dumpsters.”

Eliza snorted. “You do this often?”

Alfred managed a cracked smile. “Only occasionally.”

Eliza left, telling Alfred he should probably just give up on saving the towels. She promised to help him buy some new ones once she escaped her own mountain of homework—which, thank-you-so-much for pulling her away from—and Alfred was left alone with the unconscious man.

000

Alfred found some of the smallest clothes he could and spread them out on the floor next to the unconscious man. He fixed a can of chicken noodle soup and found some spare mugs large enough to eat out of when he realized all his bowls were dirty and he had no desire to wash them. 

He sat in the room with the unconscious man, two cups of slowly cooling soup on the table and homework on his lap. He waited for something to happen. 

He waited for so long that the second mug of soup grew cold and Alfred’s eyes grew heavy. He waited so long that, when he fell asleep, he slumped over entirely in the chair, his homework sliding off his lap and scattering on the floor.

000

When Alfred woke, there was a knife against his neck.

It was almost a little funny how calmly he handled it. Then again, after years and years of trying again and again to see if he could slash himself and people trying to stab him for interfering with crimes, he may have lost all hope that there was a knife in the world to hurt him.

As things stood, he found himself honestly more concerned of where the knife came from and how the unconscious-now-conscious man was faring than whether or not his neck was about to be slashed. 

“Dude,” he told the now-conscious man holding the knife, “you really should not be walking on that foot for like, another two weeks at least.” 

The conscious man barred his teeth and spat at Alfred, hissing, “Shut up or I’ll gut you.”

His green eyes—the color of acid in bad sci-fi movies—were narrowed to slits and his large eyebrows were drawn together so closely they almost form a unibrow. Though he was clearly young, the deep scowl on his face brought out a multitude of wrinkles Alfred would have never guessed he had. His blond hair was in utter disarray, some of it still matted together with blood. He was still naked except for bandages and boxers. And there was a knife in his hand.

“Where’d you get this?” Alfred asked, raising his hand to tap at the blade, which was immediately pressed against his esophagus. He could feel the pressure on his throat, but it was sort of like pushing into rubber, except Alfred was the rubber being pushed into. His skin bent but didn’t break.

“Do you have a death wish?” the man hissed. “Where the fuck am I and who do you work for?” 

“Free agent, buddy,” Alfred said, a grin crawling unbidden onto his face. “Or, not really an agent at all. D’you think you could maybe take that away from my neck?” 

“No,” the man said, still scowling. “Where am I?” 

“My apartment,” Alfred said. “I found you in a dumpster and brought you back here, called one of my pre-med friends and got you patched back up without taking you to a hospital. Uh. You said you didn’t want to go to one, that wasn’t neglect on my part.”

The man wavered. His arm slackened just slightly and for a moment he seemed to be struggling to remember whether or not he had really been picked up by someone and asked to not go to the hospital—considering he had fainted not long after, Alfred supposed his memory was probably going to be pretty fuzzy. 

“Get up and go against the wall,” he said. His voice didn’t have quite the harsh edge as it held before. Slowly and carefully, not pushing too much against the knife at his neck, Alfred complied. “Take your shirt off.”

“What?” 

“Your shirt. Take it off. Let me see your back and chest.” 

When Alfred hesitated, the man’s voice resumed with the hard edge and practically spat out the, “Now.” Now that Alfred s standing, he could see the man was hardly managing to balance on his injured leg and his arms were shaking just slightly, as though it took a lot of effort to hold the knife up. 

Confused but unwilling to make too much of a big deal about what was happening, Alfred pulled off his shirt. He exposed the long-faded scars of childhood and the self-inflicted burns scars from high school, pearly white against the rest of his tanned skin. Otherwise, there was nothing particularly interesting about his chest and back. That doesn’t deter the man. He circled Alfred like a hawk circled a field, looking for the unlucky mouse to move the wrong blade of grass at the wrong time. 

So Alfred stayed still. He wasn’t as worried about being stabbed as he was about revealing himself as a metahuman or ruining the knife, which he was beginning to suspect was stolen from his kitchen. 

Finally, after peering closely at Alfred’s skin and never stopping to rest his scowl, the man moved away, the knife still clutched tightly in his hand. He peered at Alfred’s face, eyes still narrowed. “Does the name ‘Wallace Llewellyn Jones’ mean anything to you?

Alfred shook his head. “Never heard of him.” He made a mental note to not reveal his last name, just in case.

“’The Whale’?”

“Uh. What?”

For another moment, the man stood still while Alfred furrowed his eyebrows. Then, the man sighed, lowered the knife and collapsed into the plush armchair. 

“Right. Okay. I’ll buy the good Samaritan excuse. You don’t tell anyone I was here or I’ll bring all hell down, understand?” 

“If you don’t give me a reason, no one has to know.” Alfred said, moving away from the wall and tugging his shirt back on. “So, is there something I can call you for right now at least?”

Even sprawled on an armchair and clearly in pain, the man still managed to look incredibly disgruntled. “They call me Art.” 

“Art?” 

“Just Art,” the man said. “And you? Exactly how often do you have people come in and threaten you in your own home, anyway? You’re taking this far too well.” 

“I’m Alfred, and I’ve officially lost all capacity to be super excited about violence and killing and stuff.” Alfred said. “Doesn’t do much for me.” 

Art made a face. “I really hope you didn’t mean that the way it sounded like you did. 

Alfred laughed, strolled over to the chair where Art was sitting and plucked the knife out of his hand before Art could even react. The man jolted and pressed up against the back of the chair, curling in on himself protectively and staring at Alfred as though he expected to be suddenly and unceremoniously slaughtered. 

“Dude, relax.” Alfred said, twirling the knife between his fingers—it was amazing the things one could do when one didn’t fear being cut— “if I wanted to hurt you, I had something like twelve hours to do it. I’ll go get you something to eat; meantime, is there someone I can call who can take care of you?” 

Art sat silently and looked at his hands for a long moment before shaking his head. “No.”

“Oh,” Alfred said, not actually expecting such an answer. He had assumed that once Art calmed down he could call a boyfriend or a girlfriend or parent or sibling or friend, or someone who would take Art off his hands. He wasn’t actually planning to have another man live with him for a month. “Are you sure? I mean, like, you’ve got to have a friend somewhere or something, right?”

For the first time, Art smiled. It was a strained, painful-looking sort of smile. His teeth looked barred and his eyebrows were still furrowed, wrinkling his face as though smiling look like the painfulest of chores.

“Nah,” Art said. “Not anymore. I’ll be fine on my own.”

“You’re a mess,” Alfred said. “You can’t go anywhere like that without help.”

“I’ll manage. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” 

Art braced his arms on the chair and pushed himself upright. His muscles were straining and Alfred could still see the edge of yellowing bruises and shallow wounds under the bandages. Alfred pursed his lips as he thought and tried to not mimic Art’s frown.

“Sit back down,” he said. “You’ve probably fucked up your foot badly enough already.” Art shot him a dirty look, which Alfred ignored. “If you can’t find somewhere to stay, you’re sitting in that chair for a month. You are not going out on your own looking like you’ve been beat to hell and back.”

“Who d’you think you are? My mother?” Art said with a sneer. 

Alfred snorted and went to the kitchen to heat up more soup and call in sick to his classes, unsure if Art would still be there when he returned. 

000

He was. 

Art was hunched in the same armchair Alfred had left him in. He took the offered chicken noodle soup and as good as devoured it. He drank two glasses of water, used the bathroom, curled in the armchair once more and fought himself for half an hour before succumbing once again to sleep. 

000

It was easy to adjust to living with Art: the other man didn’t mind sleeping on the couch or occasionally helping clean up the apartment as a ‘rent,’ though Alfred quickly learned that Art should be banned from the kitchen for anything more complicated than boiling water.

One night they were both sitting in the living room, Alfred with his biology papers spread out around him. Art was curled up with his bandaged foot and a book Alfred borrowed from the local library for the explicit purpose of keeping Art from being bored. When Art got bored he got irritable and tried to walk, and it just was not the best thing for anyone.

Midway through writing about what mitochondria did, Alfred’s cellphone rang. Art jumped—they way he did when something loud happened unexpectedly, and Alfred told himself he thought it was just a result of being beat to shit, because he didn’t really want to think that he’s housing someone for a month that someone may be following.

Alfred picked up the cell and heard his mother on the other end sobbing her eyes out, and oh no, it wasn’t ever going to be a good conversation after starting out with that.

There was a lot of going, “oh,” and “oh,” and “yeah, don’t worry, I’ll come down and visit soon; promise,” before the end.

Art peered over the edge of his book, eyebrows raised up just a little but not overtly asking a question. Still, Alfred answered him.

“Dad’s got cancer,” Alfred said. “I’ll have to go for a few days. You gonna be okay on your own? Microwave meals only, okay?”

000

It was a strange sort of feeling, walking around in his own skin and realizing at any moment he could be destroyed from the inside out.

000

Alfred left on Friday afternoon and returned late Sunday night, stumbling in the door with dark circles under his eyes and his small backpack of traveling things dragging behind him. He’d halfway forgotten he had a ‘roommate’ by then, and as he turned to enter the small kitchen he crashed right into the person trying to leave the kitchen. 

“Ow! Fuck, Jesus… you look terrible,” Art said as he bent down to pick up a few cookies which had fallen on the floor. Art was moving slowly, his foot still being in recovery.

“I know,” Alfred said. He took a few steps aside and looked down at the mess on the floor. “Sorry.” 

Art shrugged. “So, what car ran you over?” he asked. Without realizing it, Alfred flinched.

He turned from the entrance of the kitchen and went to go collapse onto the couch, instead.

“It’s just hard watching someone be so scared of dying,” Alfred said. “Not that I can criticize.” 

“Death’s a scary motherfucker,” Art said helpfully. 

“I know,” Alfred said. “I’ve got issues with that. Let’s not talk about it.” The word ‘issues?’ was halfway out of Art’s mouth when Alfred said, “I tried to kill myself a couple times but I really sucked at it, okay? That’s all.” 

Art blinked and said, “Oh.” 

“Gimme a beer? And no mentioning it to authority figures.” 

“Yeah, sure. One sec.” 

A short while later, Art returned with an open beer bottle. “So, ah, sorry about your dad?” 

Alfred shrugged and took a sip of the beer. Then another. Then a slightly deeper one. “We didn’t have the best relationship ever.” 

“That sucks.” 

“A bit, yeah.” 

“Are you going to go see him again?” 

Alfred shook his head. “He doesn’t want me to.” 

“Why not?” 

“I just got disowned,” Alfred said. A third of the beer was gone. “I got really sappy and started talking about shit I’ve kept quiet about before now, and sort of came out about things. Disowned. And fuck him, too.” 

Art’s eyebrows were raised. He lifted a hand to his left ear where an earring Alfred hadn’t really noticed before hung. “You gay?” 

Alfred paused and blinked, set down his beer on the floor beside the couch, and laughed. 

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, laughing and clutching his face, trying and failing to stop the first tears from escaping. “I guess I am that, too.” 

000

It was strange how things developed. 

It was one part alcohol, certainly. It was one part alcohol, which Alfred had only drunk sparingly before. He’d decided he liked the taste so had a twelve pack in the fridge for three weeks before Art showed up, courtesy of Gilbo. And so he and Art got drunk together, lowering Alfred’s inhibitions; heightening his emotions, and making him crave physical contact. 

It was one part proximity. Art had been living in his apartment for two weeks by then, and over the two weeks they had gotten used to each other. Alfred never asked what Art had been trying to escape and Art never asked Alfred where he went in the evenings in his heavy hoodie with a small backpack. Alfred had developed the necessary amount of trust needed to live with a person and he felt certain Art held the same trust, maybe more. But Art was there, and Alfred wanted physical contact, and so it was to Art he went.

It was one part repression. He’d dated the guy from the coffee shop in high school. He’d sucked off men in the bathrooms at college parties. He’d given handjobs and visited porn sites and when he first broke his vibrator while trying things out he’d realized there was a bit of a problem with having skin that only bent so far when exposed to pressure. And so he’d stopped letting people take his underwear off, lest someone try to slip a finger into his ass and end up with a broken index. But with the drunkness, all Alfred had to do was get on his knees and Art’s fist knotted in his hair and Alfred said, “please no anal,” and Art said “okay,” and Alfred trusted Art.

It was at least one part desperation. 

It was at least one part fear. 

It was at least one part needing something to quiet the idea that he might be erased off the earth at any moment, just like Matthew—and when he went he might go with no one beside him. 

It was at least one part primal instinct, because when humans feel they are going to die, the first thing they want to know is that they are not alone.

So Alfred woke up with Art beside him, put his head in his hands and cried and said, “Sorry, sorry, god fuck, Art, sorry, I just ruined everything, didn’t I?” 

And Art wrapped an arm around Alfred’s shoulders, pulled him into his chest and said, “My name’s Arthur, actually.” 

That was how it started. 

000


	4. Get Out The Map

Arthur had been living with Alfred for a month. They still did not question each other’s lives too deeply, unless the other brought it up first. Arthur never mentioned his life before he arrived, bruised, in the dumpster. His foot was nearly completely healed, but he still kept mostly to the corners of rooms and never ventured outside the apartment. Alfred sometimes mentioned his own life, though. After all, as far as he could tell, Arthur was abandoning whatever old life he had, and Alfred was still struggling to begin.

“I dunno if I like learning things as much as I thought I did,” Alfred said. He was sprawled on the couch with his feet up on the arm and his head and right arm falling partway to the floor.

“Hm?” Arthur said from his chair in the corner. He was always as far away from the window as he could be.

Alfred shook his head and huffed. His face was beginning to turn red from being lower than his feet. “I’m in school still, remember? The other day we were doing biology and stuff, and the teacher mentioned that by the time seven years have passed, every single one of the cells in your body’s been replaced.” 

“So like the ship?”

“What ship?”

“The Greek one. Uh, what’s the name…” 

“Look, never mind.” 

Arthur rolled his eyes. “You get upset about the stupidest things. What’s so bad about all the cells in your body getting replaced?”

Alfred rolled onto his stomach and lifted himself up on his elbows. “It’s not that! I mean, it just got me thinking about a lot of… stuff.”

“Stuff?” 

“Yeah, stuff.”

Arthur waited patiently. After a long pause, Alfred sighed again and lifted his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Look… let’s say, hypothetically, that you lost someone when you were… fourteen. By the time you’re drinking age, there isn’t a single cell in your body that’s going to remember him. Not one. Can you still say you even knew him at all?” 

“Um, yes?” Arthur said. “I don’t get why it’d be such a big deal.” 

“But it _is_ a big deal,” Alfred said. Arthur shrugged and picked up a nearby newspaper.

“Honestly, I think you have bigger things to worry about than whether or not the memory of someone is genuine. I mean, all memories are basically lies anyway. You’d be better off worrying if having all your cells replaced means _you_ aren’t the same person.”

Alfred thought about that for a moment, rolled off the couch, and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich instead.

000

There were still days when Alfred was nothing but a writhing mass of emotion. He couldn’t hold it in. Couldn’t control it. He snapped at people he wanted to be kind to and lay in bed beating his chest and pulling at his hair and trying to feel enough on the outside to match the clenching pains from within. He cried. He wanted to scream until his throat was raw and his eardrums burst, but he didn’t.

He had one of those days while Arthur was in his apartment. Alfred didn’t realize how much he had come to depend on his privacy, and he was out of practice with keeping his anguish quiet. 

Arthur came in with a cup full of hot tea and a mouthful of quiet words. 

“Shh,” he said, sitting beside Alfred’s beside and placing a hand on Alfred’s head, running his fingers through Alfred’s golden hair. Alfred was on his stomach, face buried in a pillow, trying to stop shaking. “What’s wrong?

The little chant of _obligation, obligation, don’t want little Alfie in trouble, I’m associated with him now_ came back into his ears. He hadn’t felt it so deep in his bones since Toris had found him sobbing in a restroom stall when he was fifteen and Matthew had been dead for seventeen months. 

Obligation. 

“What if the fucking—I couldn’t kill myself. I dunno. D’you believe in metaphors?”

“What?”

“Matt. Matt was trying to shove me out of the way of the car. And I couldn’t kill myself because I couldn’t kill him _again_ ; I owe it to him to stay alive as long I can, so I can’t, I can’t—” Alfred choked. “I think I crushed him.” 

Arthur said nothing. He said nothing and continued to run his hands through Alfred’s hair, and let Alfred cry until there was nothing left in him. 

000

Alfred cried for two days. He lay in bed for an hour each morning, struggled to make breakfast. He only barely managed because he knew his breakfast was Arthur’s as well. He went to classes, spoke to no one, and stumbled back home ready for the day to be done. He blasted his music into earbuds, unwilling to disturb anyone more than necessary. For two days, that was how he cried. He slept for two hours on the couch before waking after dark to put on his mask and red hoodie.

Mutely, without demanding explanations, Arthur was there for him.

000

They fell into a strange sort of relationship. Alfred never asked about Arthur’s past and Arthur never asked Alfred to stop going out at night to walk the streets or what he was doing, even once they somehow began sleeping together in the same bed. They had their own ways of going about the day. They had figured out a system, and it seemed to be a functioning one, and it was a pleasant one if Alfred were to judge it. 

It therefore came as a surprise when one day Arthur walked into the living room and announced, “I’m leaving town.”

“What?” Alfred said, looking up from his textbook. His glasses were smudged from rubbing his eyes all morning after a long, hard fight with a wannabe-rapist the night before which culminated in a fifteen-minute dash away from the cop cars riding his ass.

“My foot’s better,” Arthur said, gesturing to it. “It’s been a whole month. I really shouldn’t stay much longer.”

“Dude, I don’t mind you living here,” Alfred said. “I’ve had a great time these last few weeks.”

“I’ve enjoyed it as well,” Arthur said, moving to the armchair and sitting on the edge, crossing his legs and looking at his nails. “But I’ve been inside the entire time and I’m going to burst if I don’t get out soon.” 

“You’re not exactly locked in here,” Alfred said. 

“But I can’t go out in the city,” Arthur said. He sighed. “Look, I can’t exactly explain the entire thing to you. I’m proving how much I care just by giving you forewarning. I have been known to leave in the middle of the night without a word. This is your thanks.”

Alfred bit his lip and frowned. He felt he’d gotten to know Arthur pretty well over the last few weeks. He knew how Arthur took his tea and what time he got up in the morning. He knew that Arthur hated cabbage soup and McDonald’s hamburgers above all other foods, and when he was bored he would tie his shoelaces into all manner of complex knots. He knew Arthur liked cats, as a little orange and white kitten dumped in an alley keening, for its mother, had been the only thing which got him even relatively close to a window frame the entire time Alfred had known him.

“Why can’t you explain it?” Alfred asked. 

“For the same reason I haven’t told you why I was beat to shit when we met,” Arthur said. “I’m sure you understand.” 

Alfred watched him for a long moment. He sighed. “When are you planning to leave?”

“Bus goes at nine-thirty tonight,” Arthur said. “I don’t have long.” 

“Can I at least walk you to the stop?” Alfred asked. 

Arthur blinked as though he were horribly confused for a moment. Then, he smiled. It was an odd, small smile, as though his face wasn’t entirely used to expressing emotion that wasn’t tinted with spite or anger. 

“That might be all right,” he said. 

000

Alfred ordered in Indian food and they had a small feast on the floor, sitting with boxed meals between their legs and bottles of soda by their knees. They watched television and when they were feeling especially brave, one of them would lay a hand on the other’s thigh. Their shoulders touched and they ended up wrapped in a large blue blanket when the air conditioning refused to turn off and nearly froze them. Alfred packed up all their leftovers into the fridge and took the trash out to the dumpster. He didn’t waste time doing homework. They gave each other blowjobs on the couch, instead.

They left for the bus station at nine. The sun had already set and the street lamps were lit. Arthur carried nothing but a small bag filled with snack food, the few fitting clothes Alfred had found at Goodwill, and a handful of personal possessions he had somehow managed to acquire or hold on to during his stay. Most other people had already arrived home from work or were in the middle of an evening shift. There were few others on the sidewalks. 

Arthur was silent and serious. His face was drawn and his wrinkles were showing. He hugged the bag of possessions to his chest and skulked through the city like a shadow. Without thinking, Alfred fell into step beside him, slipping through the darkness as he did when stalking unaware criminals. If Arthur found this strange, he kept it to himself aside from a few brief sideways glances in Alfred’s direction. 

Though Alfred knew Arthur was taking this brief walk across town to the bus station very seriously, he couldn’t help but feel it was in actually a sort of game: who could skulk the quietest? The fastest? The smoothest? His imagination had run away with him in making his branch of fantasy real-life masked heroes who fought crime alongside him, and they had all somehow morphed into Arthur. 

Arthur fell into step beside him, then almost overtook him, perhaps feeling a bit competitive himself. Alfred grinned and matched his pace, and in no time it had turned into a real game. All the years of paying close attention to his surroundings faded to the back of Alfred’s mind. They were ducking and dodging through the streets, just a few smiles away from laughter, grinning widely and not two blocks from their destination.

It was surprise and momentum more than pain which knocked him to the ground.

Arthur shouted, and there was a man—two men—standing about him. One of them had a crowbar. The other had Arthur by his armpits. Before Alfred regained control of his legs, they were dragging Arthur into the nearby alley. 

He stumbled to his feet. Even though he didn’t feel the pain, something about the fall had rattled him. His body was slow to obey his commands. Or perhaps the adrenaline rushing through his veins so quickly the world seemed too slow for once. It was hard to tell. Alfred didn’t stop to try and figure it out.

In his mind, a car was crashing.

Both their attackers had bright red hair; the larger one with the crowbar had piercings in his ears and eyebrows. The slighter of the two was freckled and holding a gun, his eyes bright green like traffic lights. One of them said, “Look, it’s nothing personal Arty, so shut up and let’s do this fast,” as the gun came up.

Arthur was shouting and kicking and pinned to the wall as the metal beast closed in.

Alfred swept in front of Arthur, knocking aside the large one and his crowbar. The bullet met his chest and the impact knocked the air from his lungs. 

Alfred half expected to finally, finally die in Mattie’s place, but he was still alive and gasping for breath when Arthur lunged out from behind him at their assailants, snarling and wild. 

Arthur ripped the gun from the slighter one’s hand and turned in on them just in time to be knocked aside by the large one. 

Alfred’s chest ached like his heart was breaking again, but his years of fighting training kicked in on instinct. Once he was on his feet again he was moving through this fight like all the others he had in back alleys trying to protect Mattie. 

Things blurred together. There were flashes of red and shouted curses and near misses with the gun, but when his memory started working properly again, he had Arthur’s wrist in one hand and a bloodied crowbar in the other. He tossed the crowbar to the side and turned the final corner to the bus stop. The bus was there, just about to pull away as they approached. He let go of Arthur’s wrist.

“No, get on with me,” Arthur shouted, halfway up the steps. “Come! Now!”

Alfred clambered on behind him, digging frantically through his pockets and practically throwing his pay at the bus driver and rushing behind Arthur to take a seat. The bus began moving just as he sat down.

He was panting and his chest ached a deep sort of ache, ribs bruised from the bullet and insides battered from his pounding heart.

It was quiet on the bus. It was so much quieter than the already-fuzzy memory of screaming and gunshots in the alley that everything felt somehow less real.

Arthur was curled in a seat in the far back. There was hardly anyone riding, and the back was deserted, and Arthur had hidden himself in the most isolated corner, his legs drawn up to his chest, his eyes wide and his chest heaving. 

Alfred slid into the seat beside him. For a long time, they sat in silence. 

“They shot you,” Arthur said in a whisper. There was music playing on the speakers overhead. Something from Mika. It was so cheerful a sound it seemed foreign in his ears. _We are young. We are strong._ It was doubtful anyone else would be able to hear their words over the rumble of the bus and the music. 

“Yeah,” Alfred said. “I know.” 

“You’re not bleeding. You’re not wearing any special vest or anything.”

Alfred swallowed the lump in his throat and comforted himself that Arthur was leaving anyway. “Uh,” he said. “’Mma metahuman.” 

“Oh.” Arthur said. “ _Oh_.”

“Didn’t really want anyone to know…” Alfred mumbled. 

“I… I understand that,” Arthur said. “Oh.”

Alfred nodded. 

“…You shouldn’t be apologizing though,” Arthur said after a moment. He sounded uncertain, shifting in his seat. “You had a good reason to not tell things. Uh. _I’m_ sorry,” Arthur said. “I doubt you can come back here again. I didn’t mean for that to happen.” 

Alfred nodded.

They were silent for another long stretch of time. The bus stopped. Two people gathered their luggage and left; a young woman got on. The door closed. The bus was moving again. The song in the overhead speakers had changed. It was someone called Elana Brody, if Alfred heard the DJ. _It’s clear to me that our history is just a freckle, a speck in time..._

“Why I can’t go back?” Alfred said. They were some ways beyond the city limits by then.

“Barclay will remember you. He draws. They’ll know your face. Soon enough they’ll find your apartment.”

“Oh,” said Alfred.

“Yeah,” said Arthur.

Another stretch of silence. 

“So I guess you’re stuck with me?” Alfred said. A smile flickered on his face briefly before the effort of holding it there became too much. 

“If you want to come,” Arthur said. He shrugged. “I don’t exactly have much of a plan. I was mostly focused on getting out alive.”

Alfred nodded again. 

Arthur continued speaking. “We’re a small gang. They won’t follow us beyond a few cities. Certainly not out of state. Now that we’re moving we should be okay. If your family lives far enough off, I’m sure you could go to them.”

Alfred shook his head. “They live less than an hour from where I was.” 

“Oh,” Arthur said. He reached out and took Alfred’s hand. “I’m sorry.” 

“Will they be okay?” 

“Of course. I’m sure.” 

“Oh. Good.” Alfred gave Arthur’s hand a squeeze. There was another short stretch of silence filled only with the rumbling of the bus and the music overhead. “I was supposed to finish college in two years, you know,” he said. “I had a job. All my stuff is back in my apartment still.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mom is going to wonder what happened to me when she gets the notice that I vanished.” 

“I know, I’m so sorry.” 

“I was starting to make friends.” 

Arthur’s face contorted as though he were in pain. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let you walk me to the bus. It was stupid.” 

“Who were they?” Alfred asked.

Arthur grimaced and took several moments to apparently collect his thoughts. “They’re my… my not-really brothers. It’s not the biggest city, but it’s still big enough. Kids get… left behind. Mum picked us all up and gave us a home. The gang. It was our family. There’s a few dozen of us at least. She died a few months ago. After that It all went to hell and in-fighting. Barky and Aiden work together, I don’t think they’ve ever had a fight that lasted more than a few minutes, but they don’t want to take control, they’re scared of too much power. Wally knows they just want things to calm down, so he’s probably using that to make them take out _problems_. They always liked him better than me. We’ve been trying to snuff each other for the last half year. Apparently Wally finally convinced them I was the one who had to go. That’s what that was.” 

“Oh god, you’re trying to kill your brother?”

“No,” Arthur’s voice had fallen to a hoarse whisper. His knees were still drawn up to his chest. “I left. I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to start over where no one knows shit about me.” 

There was another long, drawn silence between them. It stretched on for many minutes. A town rolled past the darkened windows. People boarded and left the bus. There were still two stops before the bus would turn around and start the return trip.

“Can I start over with you?”

“What?” Arthur said, jolting upwards. He had apparently gotten lost in thought during their silence.

“Can I start over with you?” Alfred said a second time. “I know you want to start over entirely, but… can I do it with you? No judgments?” 

“What about your family? I’m sure you’d figure out something to tell them to make them move. You could be with them again,” Arthur said. “You’ve still got your life.”

Alfred nodded slowly, considering his words slowly. 

“I told you I wanted to die before,” he said. Arthur tensed in the seat beside him. “I don’t think I want to die. Not really. I just…I think at this point I just want to change everything around and take my life back from… from whatever it’s been. I haven’t had a life of my own since I was fourteen. I mean, I don’t want to forget him, but… I want to… I want to stop thinking about him every day. Move on a little. Figure out how to plan for the future without wondering what the point is. Does that make any sense?”

Alfred didn’t get a response. He shifted uncomfortably and looked away from Arthur’s face. 

“I’m tired of being sad, and you’re the first person in a long time I’ve been… just happy with. So can I come with you?” his smiled a thin smile, trying to not give in to the urge to cry which had suddenly whelled up in his throat, making breathing difficult. “If nothing else, I’m a pretty good human shield.” 

Arthur’s smile was slow. So was his quiet chuckle. And then they were hugging each other. At some point they surrendered to their urges and began crying. The song on the radio changed again to something new. A band which sounded familiar, though Alfred couldn’t place it. He wasn’t trying very hard though, not with Arthur sobbing into his shoulder and him weeping into Arthur’s hair, ignoring any looks the rest of the bus’s passengers might be giving them, as though no one had ever seen two grown men cry. _I’m gonna clear my head_ , the song sang.

“So where to first?” Alfred ask, mumbling and kissing Arthur’s scalp. He could feel the wet against his shoulder shift as Arthur replied. 

“I dunno. Maybe out of state. Maybe a small town somewhere. Somewhere safe.” 

Alfred shook his head. “…what about somewhere with lots of uh… night life?”

“Why?” 

Alfred shifted until Arthur was partway in his lap, and Arthur shifted the rest of the way on. It was a completely nonsexual action. They curled much more effectively into each other in the corner of the bus where it was harder for prying eyes to reach them. They could hold each other closer and pepper tiny butterfly kisses onto each other’s wet faces. 

“I’ve got a few more secrets than just being a metahuman I guess,” Alfred mumbled against the bridge of Arthur’s nose. He could feel the smile against his chin.

“Cut out a few words and you might’ve had a one-liner, there.”

“Sorry.” 

“It’s okay.” Arthur’s hand ran through his hair and ruffled it, tried to smooth down his cowlick. “So what’s the new secret? You’re not in a gang too, right?” 

Alfred resisted shaking his head, unwilling to pull away enough to do so. “No. Not like that. It’s a really long story, now that I think about it.”

Arthur’s lips had moved to his ears; his breath was warm. His chest pressed against Alfred's shoulder closely enough that Alfred could could feel his heartbeat. He said, “You an idiot. We’re running away. We'll wind up dead one way or another eventually, there's no point in rushing it. That way, until then, we have all the time in the world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ship Arthur mentions is the ship of Theseus. Alfred is citing a popular belief that once every seven (sometimes ten) years all the cells in the body will have been replaced, and equating that with the Theseus paradox. While all cells have a finite lifetime, some brain cells (like neurons in the cerebral cortex) are never replaced, and therefore hopefully last a human's lifetime. http://www.livescience.com/33179-does-human-body-replace-cells-seven-years.html 
> 
> Final A/N will be in the epilogue, which I'm posting right after this.


	5. A Brief Epilogue: Perfect World

They spent the rest of the bus ride, and the bus ride after that, and the days and months following, sharing stories and dark secrets and hidden thoughts. In a bar in downtown Cincinnati, Arthur told Alfred about his stuffed animal collection. Two days later, in a cheap roadside motel, Alfred told Arthur how often he thought of not dying but _death_. Arthur responded by confiding how often he thought about the people his mother made him hurt. 

Some days they slept together. Other days, they held each other closely and didn’t say a word. Still, there were days when they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Alfred dyed his hair red and Arthur said he looked like a ruffian, so they bleached it back to blond. Arthur took up cooking lessons. They found jobs. Arthur found a passion for literature. Alfred found a new mask. Sometimes Arthur joined Alfred on the streets, and each time Alfred tried to call Arthur a sidekick the few parts of him which felt pain were thoroughly exploited. 

Alfred wrote to Mr. Bonnefoy once, asking him to tell his mother that he was alive and well, and maybe he would see her again one day. Arthur never wrote to his family, though he spoke about them often for years.

They traveled the country and visited outside of it two or three times: London, Essex and Vancouver. 

They got jobs and addictions, went to rehab and then to Disneyland. Eventually they did grow apart and go their separate ways. 

They had said goodbye before, they knew that they had been loved. They knew that somewhere there was someone who wanted them happy.

Sometimes they called each other and caught up with the missed days. Arthur found freedom and a career in short stories. Alfred got an entry in the RLSH wiki and found friends. He died at fifty-four, having spent the rest of his life saving Matties, and woke to an apartment building made of dream-stuff, rubies, and time. There was a receptionist who chewed pink bubblegum at the desk when he arrived. 

She said, “Don’t be a stranger,” smiled, and directed him to room 34. Alfred rode the elevator up silently. The carpets in the halls had a distinct pattern to them, though Alfred couldn’t have quite placed it.

He stood outside of room 34 for a long, long time. It might have been decades. He watched the stars fly past outside a window, though there were no windows in the hall. He watched the sun rise and set and the moon float by. 

Then, after years of waiting, he opened the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE5p4aHlI5c
> 
> 000
> 
> A message to people suffering: 
> 
> -It's okay to be scared and sad and to have bad days-- it is okay. It is okay. It is okay.   
> -It hurts and it will keep hurting, but even though things will never be GOOD again, that doesn't mean things don't get BETTER.   
> -Don't let people tell you that they "know what you're going through" because they don't, they just don't know what to say and don't realize how that phrase can hurt.  
> -Eventually, if you hold on long enough, you can fill in the cracks enough that you hardly notice them anymore.  
> -If you don't want to turn to a god, don't let anyone make you turn to a god. If you do turn to a god, by golly turn to that god. Dealing with things happens differently to everyone, and going to therapy does not make you weak.  
> -Please, believe the me who believes in you.
> 
> 000
> 
> As you all have figured out by now, this is a story about mourning. It isn't exactly a very good hetalia-ish story, but it is something I started writing because of being disappointed in the Superhero tag, and it evolved into something else. As Alfred has recovered, so have I begun to definitively. Our experiences are not the same, and I am not going to tell people which parts are real and which parts are only part of Alfred's journey, but I will say that if you were in any way offended by this work, I am sorry and I don't know what else to tell you. I'm sorry, but this is also an experiment in verisimilitude. I have been disappointed for years with the other stories about the stages of grief I see online. They seem too linear and scientific, as though someone is trying to emulate emotions with facts. I don't like the idea of people going through grief and having only those stories while searching for proof that they aren't alone. This is the only way I can mend that. That's why this story is here, and why I will apologize for offending people or going OOC or writing terrible, terrible things, but I will not apologize for writing this story. 
> 
> This story is dedicated to my brother, Jacob.
> 
> The songs used in the titles are all by the Indigo Girls.


End file.
